- Race, politics, and religion are three of the most challenging issues to discuss in contemporary America.

But today's guest explains the experience of a dedicated group of citizens at a Cincinnati megachurch who went, as the saying goes, where angels might fear to tread.

She's Hahrie Han, this week on Story of the Public Square.

(gentle upbeat music) (gentle upbeat music continues) (gentle upbeat music fades) Hello and welcome to Story in the Public Square, where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from The Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with Salve's Pell Center.

- And our guest this week is Hahrie Han, Inaugural Director of the SNF Agora Institute and a Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University.

She's also the author of a remarkable new book, "Undivided: The Quest for Racial Solidarity in an American Church."

She's joining us today from Baltimore.

Hahrie, thank you so much for being with us.

- Thanks so much for having me.

I'm looking forward to the conversation.

- You know, I found the book moving and informative, and just a joy to read.

For those who have not read it yet, do you wanna give us a quick overview?

- Sure.

I'm so glad to hear that you enjoyed the book.

The book traces the stories of four people who are organizing around racial justice within the third largest evangelical megachurch in America.

So, the church's name called the Crossroads Church, it's a non-denominational protestant church in Cincinnati, Ohio.

It's about 80% white, 20% non-white.

And it is a huge church that draws now about 35,000 people to its services each week.

In 2015, they started this program on racial justice.

That was an unusual program at the time and what the book does is traces the stories of four people, a Black man, a white man, a white woman, and a Black woman who each went through the program where animates work on anti-racism and then had to grapple with what that meant in their lives as they took on that work.

- So, you mentioned the Crossroads Church and you said you started following them in 2015.

What drew them to you in the first place or drew you to them in the first place?

- Yeah, so I was actually in Cincinnati because there was a ballot initiative in 2016 that was just an unusual kind of outcome in that election.

So, if you remember, 2016 was the election, Trump versus Clinton.

Trump won Ohio by something like eight percentage points.

But in that same election, Cincinnati voters voted in a new tax on their own property that was designed to fund universal preschool for the poor Black community in the city.

And that ballot initiative passed by the largest margin of any new education tax in Cincinnati history.

So I thought, that's weird, like how did those two things happen in the same election?

And so I was in Cincinnati trying to understand how that ballot initiative came together and people kept telling me, there's this church, they're sending all these volunteers, and that happens a lot in these kind of political campaigns.

But when I found out that they were coming from a really large evangelical megachurch and that it was a whole group of Black and white volunteers hundreds of whom had spent hours and hours and hours on the campaign, I thought, okay, there's something unusual here.

And that's how I came into that story.

- So Hahrie, can you define what a megachurch is and where they're located around the country, and the historical roost go back to Billy Graham and some of the other preachers of the 1980s, but where are they and what are they in America?

- Yeah.

Yeah, so I did not grow up in the evangelical community and so this is something that I learned a lot about through doing research on the book.

A megachurch is defined usually as a church that is 2,000 or more people.

And what I didn't realize is that megachurches are really the growth edge of American Christianity right now.

And so, if you've heard research or data about the way in which churches in America are dying, it's true.

Like the median church in America has less than a hundred people and it's shrinking in size.

Megachurches are growing so that the average megachurch grew by 34% in the last period that we have data, which is 2015 to 2020.

And church attendance has gotten so skewed towards these big churches that the largest 9% of churches in America by size contain 50% of the church-going population.

So it's heavily skewed towards these large churches.

And so they really exist all over the United States.

Traditionally, they were first started in suburban communities 'cause that's where you have the kind of physical space to be able to host gatherings that large.

But now they're just, they exist everywhere.

They're in New York City, they're in California, they're in red states, they're in blue states, they're everywhere.

- So let's get into the central characters of the book and there are four of them.

And it really holds the narrative together and the writing is just so good in addition to the issues that you explore.

Tell us about the Crossroads Pastor Chuck Mingo.

- Yeah.

So Chuck is, he was the highest ranking Black pastor in Crossroads.

He originally grew up in Philadelphia in the Black church, moved to Cincinnati because he thought that he was gonna be a businessman with Procter and Gamble.

Procter and Gamble is one of the big companies that's headquartered in Cincinnati.

And while he was there, he found, he felt called to go into ministry.

And so he eventually joined the pastoral team at Crossroads.

And because he had grown up in the Black church, he had grown up in a community where race was very much at the center of what was talked about in his faith community.

But Crossroads as a white-dominant church had not really contended with issues of race very much.

But in 2015 there was a police shooting of an unarmed Black man in Cincinnati that brought the national debate about policing and racial injustice and a lot of those questions to Cincinnati's backyard.

And Chuck felt like he couldn't stay quiet anymore.

So one Sunday he stood up on the main stage at Crossroads and preached about how he felt a calling to be a voice on issues of race within the city.

He thought it was just gonna be one sermon and he wasn't really sure how people were gonna react.

But to his surprise, he got this outpouring of support from the community where so thousands of people reached out to him and said, "Look, if you're gonna do something on this, I wanna be a part of it."

And so, that's what animated him to really develop a team around him that developed the program that became Undivided, which is the program that's funded, that's a profiled within the book.

- You know, one of the things that I find so fascinating is the, so here we have a Black pastor at a predominantly white evangelical church taking the stand and the church moving some resources behind him to support him.

But it's a very complex history of race relations in the evangelical church.

Can you unpack that a little bit for us now?

- Yeah, so a couple things on that.

First, one of the things that I really learned from doing research on this project and that I hope becomes clear for people who read the book is that I think there's a lot more heterogeneity within the white evangelical community on issues of race than we might commonly understand.

So if you're someone like me who before I did this project, my primary impression of white evangelicalism came from reading stories in the New York Times.

You know, the salient number that you might know is the idea that eight in 10 white evangelicals voted for Trump.

You know, that it felt like these churches are just cauldrons of white Christian nationalism.

And that's why I was so surprised to hear that this church was sending so many volunteers to this ballot initiative campaign.

And what I learned is that the history is actually a lot more complex than that.

So, white evangelicalism actually had a large effort around racial reconciliation that started in a lot of these megachurches in like the 1990s or so through a program called Promise Keepers.

That was a really large movement within the faith tradition that brought thousand, I mean millions of men together to kinda call, to think about their role in living out Christian values.

And racial reconciliation was a really large part of that effort.

But they focused on race primarily as a problem of interpersonal and discrimination, right?

And so the idea was if I can erase racism from my heart, then that'll solve a lot of these problems.

And that was really what the focus in a lot of these churches was.

And I think one of the things that was unusual about Undivided in the program that Chuck started is that he really wanted to make sure that it focused not only on interpersonal racism, but also structural injustice as well.

And in doing so, I think that there were lots of ways in which Crossroads really supported the work that Undivided was doing, but also struggled with what it meant for them as a megachurch to bring a program like this into the center of the work that they were doing.

- So, the second major character is Sandra, who is a Black woman.

Give us a little more detail about Sandra.

- Yeah, so Sandra is the only character for whom I use a pseudonym at her request.

She is a Black woman who grew up in a conservative Black family in California.

So she's the only character who actually grew up attending a megachurch in California.

Her parents were Black Republicans and she moved to Cincinnati 'cause she originally was following a boy there, eventually kinda settled down and had her family there.

And she was married to a white man and started Undivided because her oldest son was starting to become school age and they were having trouble kinda talking about race within the context of her marriage.

So she thought, oh, here's this program within my church that I don't really have to worry about questions of race in my own life or racism, but I need to understand like how I can have this conversation about race with my husband about our children that are growing up in this society.

So that's why she started Undivided.

But one of the things that she really learned through the program is to use her words.

She sort of says like we all have racial wounds.

And the program really animated her to kinda rethink her own identity as a Black woman and what that meant, both for how she wanted to orient to her church, but also to her broader social community.

And part of what the book does is it traces her journey as she becomes more animated to work on issues of anti-racism.

It creates a lot of tension within her marriage.

And she, like all the characters experience backlash.

And the challenge that she has to kinda grapple with is what is she willing to risk in a way in order to stay true to these values around anti-racism.

- And then you have Grant who is a white man in his 60s and he has a fascinating background and story, as do all of the characters.

Tell us a little bit about Grant, please.

- Yeah, so Grant's actually younger.

So he is in his 30s I think, when the book begins.

But he grew up in a small town in Ohio in a conservative Christian family.

He was Republican because he thought all Christians had to be Republican in the environment that he grew up in.

And so, he went to college in Kentucky to a small Christian college there.

And he was president of the college Republicans.

He became the statewide president of the College Republicans in Texas, I mean in, sorry, in Kentucky.

And he interned at Fox News.

He kinda has this profile that you might think of as being his typical kinda white conservative Christian profile.

But then when he was younger, his parents had adopted a baby who was Black and he was very close to his brother, but his brother had been raised in this community that was 97% white 'cause it was in rural Ohio.

So, there were questions about race that they had never really grappled with in their relationship.

And Grant started Undivided thinking, oh, because he has this brother who is Black, like he has this capacity to kinda have these conversations.

And the program kind of opened his eyes to a lot of questions about race that his brother must have grappled with that he never really understood.

And so, that started him on this journey of rethinking and remaking his relationship with his brother, but also thinking about how he might wanna orient to a lot of questions around race in his life.

- So, the last real character that you bring to us is Jess, who's a white woman whose family's history with race is complicated.

Tell us a little bit about Jess and why she chose to get involved in Undivided.

- Yeah, so Jess is a white woman.

She grew up, her father literally had the words white power tattooed on the back of his triceps.

And so, he was literally in the KKK, she grew up with this kind of white supremacist ideology.

And as a kid she just kind of accepted what her parents told her, but never really grappled with it.

She became addicted to opioids in high school and then was eventually incarcerated.

And in prison she both developed a relationship with God, but then also began to question her orientations to race 'cause in prison, of course she was in relationship with people from all different kinds of backgrounds.

And they of course did not adhere to the stereotypes that she had been taught as a child.

And so, when she came out of prison, she found Crossroads as a way of sustaining her faith.

And after a few years when this opportunity to start Undivided came, she thought, oh, like here's a chance for me to learn things that maybe will help me make sense of these confusing messages that I've gotten.

But when she started Undivided, like one of the things that she says is she was taught that the last racist killed Martin Luther King and racism was done in America after that.

So she had never heard words like blackface or she had never heard about structural injustice before.

And so Undivided just really opened her eyes to a world of learning and knowledge that she had never been exposed to.

- You know, I think we've maybe made oblique reference to Undivided.

Do you wanna tell us a little bit about the program itself and what it's set out to do?

- Sure.

So Undivided itself is the racial justice program that Chuck started when after he gave that sermon and had this kind of outpouring of response.

It started as a six-week program that basically takes people through a curriculum that is not dissimilar to a lot of other diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, DEI programs.

And so, it teaches people about structural injustice in America.

It teaches people about empathy and implicit racism.

It has them take evaluative tests to evaluate their own implicit racism scores and things like that.

But it organizes people into small groups that are mixed race, so that after you learn about something like implicit racism, then you're invited in these small groups to kinda contend with how you might respond to different situations.

And so, those small groups become ground zero for people learning, I think how they wanna respond to these different questions.

And then after the six-week program ends, everyone is invited into what they call on-ramps, which are essentially programs through which they can continue the work of anti-racism.

And there's a variety of different programs that they can become a part of.

- You know, one of the things that I found so compelling about this is these small group engagements where people really had an opportunity, not in every group, but in some groups to really form meaningful, deep interpersonal relationships.

And just reading that, my reaction was, that's the secret sauce, that people got to know each other on a deeper level than just sort of acknowledging that somebody, oh, I've seen them in church.

Is that really what's at the heart of the success here?

- Yeah, I think that's exactly right.

Like I think the small groups were really pivotal because what it did was it gave people a human-scaled place through which they could grapple concretely with this question of what does it mean to really take seriously the dignity of all people, including people who are of the opposite race from me.

And I think like I have to do a DEI training every year as part of my employment at Johns Hopkins University.

And there's never that opportunity, which I get taught a curriculum, I get told the legal requirements of how I must behave in different situations, and then I take a little test and check a box at the end of it, right?

And there's never this opportunity to kinda put those learnings into action in a very human way.

And so, I think the fact that it was an intimate group of eight to 10 people, some of whom were of the same race as me and some of whom were different race than me, really made a huge difference in both creating a community of belonging that enabled me to feel safe enough to take risks, but also to create a space in which I could try, like, get on the bike and fall off the bike and say things that were offensive, but then try again and get immediate feedback on the things that I was doing.

And the fact that then also because it was nested within this large megachurch, it meant that the work felt small and big at the same time, right?

It was intimate and it was human, it was nested in a community of belonging, but it was also, I was part of something bigger than myself.

And that's a really unique situation.

- So Hahrie, each week had a theme and we're not gonna get into all of them.

I urge people to read the book to get into all of them.

There was redeem, relationship, reality, and repentance.

Tell us about repentance, and then I'm gonna get to one more, but what happened during the repentance week?

- Yeah, so repentance is a part of the curriculum they had in Undivided in the beginning.

They've actually moved away from it now in subsequent iterations of the curriculum.

But in repentance, what they wanted people to do was to have an opportunity to essentially repent for ways in which they might have ignored or overlooked or been callous to questions of racial injustice in their lives.

And so, they would, people both Black and white would say things like I ignored my racist uncle or I was callous to the needs of my brother who was adopted and is Black.

And then they would say that and in the context of the faith tradition, like forgiveness is a big thing.

And usually someone at the opposite race would say, "I see you and I forgive you for your sins," right?

And it was, I think people who were part of it felt like it was a very powerful experience.

The reason why Undivided moved away from it was they didn't want people to feel like you could apologize, gain forgiveness, and then be absolved of your work of struggling for injustice.

And so, it had a little bit of that feel to it enough that they decided to take it out of the curriculum.

- What about reconciliation?

Is that still in the curriculum?

- Yeah, so reconciliation, so when they first started Undivided, one of the things they learned, and I should just sort of say the first cohort of Undivided that they launched was in 2016, 1,200 people from the church signed up.

So they have- - Wow.

- Over a thousand people gathering each week at the Crossroads Church to go through this curriculum and then do this work in their small groups.

And what they realized is that over half of the people who were part of the Undivided curriculum had never had someone of the opposite race over to their home for dinner.

And that was just really striking that like a lot of the white people had never had a person of color in their home for dinner.

And a lot of them, people of color had never had a white person over dinner.

So they decided the final week was gonna be a week in which they each met, not in the church, but in the homes of people, of someone in the small group.

So someone would host a meal at their house, they would all bring a potluck entree to share, and then it created this opportunity for reconciliation, right?

For a place for them to break bread together and then form relationships that would become the grounding of the work they were gonna do going forward.

- Hahrie, one of the things that struck me was, so in high school I had a theater teacher who said that the essence of a good story is that something's happening.

And what really I thought impressed me is that this is great scholarship and tremendous writing, but something's happening in the lives and in the inner dialogue of each of these people.

So I think in particularly of Grant and Jess who seem troubled with previous moments where maybe they were silent in the face of racism.

And by the end they feel like they cannot remain silent anymore.

Can you talk to us a little bit about that arc, that personal journey that they had to take to get to that point?

Because I think a lot of people have had those moments where you're in a room, somebody says something, and what do you do?

- Yeah, so maybe Jess is probably, talking about Jess' story is sort of a good way to illustrate that.

So, Jess grew up in a family that was explicitly racist, right?

That they actually preached an ideology of white supremacism.

She had her dad who had the words white power tattooed on his arms.

Her uncle had a swastika tattooed on his chest.

And so, she kind of heard all these things as a kid and never really knew how to react.

And then even as she got older and began to educate herself and learn about some of these, the history of what these symbols meant, she wasn't sure how to react.

And it's a hard thing, right?

We all have the racist uncle, or we all have been in situations where people make jokes that are inappropriate and it's hard to know how to react because you don't wanna disturb the peace.

And I think one of the things that Jess says in the book that I quote is this idea that one of the things that Undivided taught her is how you can help other people move their goalposts without moving yours, you know?

And so, the idea is how do you engage people in a conversation about the beliefs that they might have without necessarily feeling like you have to sacrifice your own values?

And so, she talks about in, like, there's a story that I tell in the book about when she's talking with her mom about Philando Castile, who was a Black man, an unarmed Black man who was shot by law enforcement in Minnesota.

And they're talking about the story and there's a moment in the Philando Castile story when he was pulled over by a police officer, and the police officer asked him to get his license.

And so, he leans over to the glove compartment to get his license, and he has a legal gun in there.

And that that's what sort of instigates this whole setting that eventually ends in his death.

And his mom is like, "Well, he shouldn't have had a gun," you know?

And Jess kinda has this moment of saying, well, should I say something or should I not say something?

And she eventually calls her mom out and says, "Why are you saying he shouldn't have had a gun?

It was a legal gun, you know?

And like, why are we not standing up for his right to gun ownership in the same way that we might for others?

Is it because he's Black?"

You know, and she kinda calls her mom out on those assumptions.

And that creates real tension in the family, obviously, which is a risk that, especially for someone like Jess who is in long-term recovery after her addiction to opioids and her mom was a crucial part of her support structure and long-term recovery.

And so, I think one of the things that I hope is clear in the book is that I'm not trying to argue that Undivided was a perfect program, or that Crossroads was a perfect program, or any of these characters are perfect people.

But what I respect about all of them, the programs, the church, the people, is that they're committed to staying in the struggle, right?

They're committed to continuing to grapple with what does it mean to live out these values, to really honor the dignity of all people in my life.

And so, there are a lot of ways in which they make mistakes sometimes.

Like, I think Jess, in talking about that conversation about Philando Castile, she wished that she hadn't lost her temper with her mom.

You know, maybe she could have been a more effective advocate if she had stayed calmer in that conversation.

But the fact that she's continuing to grapple with that I think is a theme that we see throughout all the characters.

- So, Hahrie, we have less than two minutes left, but I wanna ask this question.

Can the lessons of Undivided be applied to the country today, which is so divided and bitterly divided along many, many lines, political, religious, and the list is long?

- Yeah, I absolutely think it can.

And the thing that I've been thinking about a lot is, Undivided and these megachurches have been growing by leaps and bounds in a moment where so many of our other institutions are not.

And that why is that?

And I think it's because they're speaking... People are hungry for authentic opportunities to put their hands on the levers of change and figure out how they can shape the kind of world that we all wanna live in.

And I do really believe that a lot of people want to figure out how to live in a community that is not as divided as the one that we have right now, but they're not invited into opportunities to do so.

And so what Undivided did was it invited people to sort of say, "Hey, can you figure out how it is that you can rebuild these kind of relationships with people who are different from you?

And I hope that more people have those opportunities in their communities.

- Yeah, Hahrie, real quick.

Does this leave you, does this experience leave you more optimistic about our ability to solve some of these problems?

- Yes, absolutely.

Because I think when you invite people into these chances, and I think people respond and they engage in that struggle that we've been talking about in ways that I really respect.

- It is a remarkable read.

The book is "Undivided."

She is Hahrie Han.

That is all the time we have this week.

But if you wanna know more about Story in the Public Square, you can find us on social media or visit pellcenter.org where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join us again next time for our story in the Public Square.

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